In 2010-11, the University of Memphis men's basketball team brought in $6.7 million. Will Barton, who spent 18 hours that year playing for the Tigers and hundreds of hours practicing and preparing for those games, saw none of it.

In 2010-11, the University of Tennessee football team made $56.8 million, which was about one-third of the city of Knoxville's budget for the same fiscal year. The city employed about 1,500 that year. The Vols' coach, Derek Dooley, who won six games and lost seven, made $1.8 million. Nick Reveiz, who made 108 tackles, that jarring shoulder-to-shoulder collision with other men just as large, made nothing.

In 2010-11, the University of Mississippi athletic department brought in $48.9 million. Last August, Ole Miss unveiled plans to raise $150 million to build a new arena and revamp and expand the stadium, which is rarely sold out. Defensive tackle Gilbert Pena, who had to quit football after high school to help support his family when his mom was diagnosed with cancer, hasn't received a cent since starting in 2011.

See where we're going with this?

Now that those college football stadiums across the country are again filling up on fall Saturdays, the elephant in the stadium is back: Should college athletes be paid? Here are the fans, paying hundreds of dollars for their trips. Here are the coaches, making millions — and possibly making millions just to go away when they fail. Here are the television cameras, with the billions of dollars their owners pay

for the rights to televise the games, sell advertising so they can turn a profit — and thoroughly scramble the notion that institutions of higher education field athletic programs for the spirit of competition and the sharpening of minds.

In perhaps the most significant debate-starter yet, the respected civil rights historian Taylor Branch made a case for paying athletes in an October 2011 article in the Atlantic.

Branch argued forcefully in a 15,000-word essay, a longer version of which was published as an e-book with the name "The Cartel."

"Slavery analogies should be used carefully," he wrote. "College athletes are not slaves. Yet to survey the scene — corporations and universities enriching themselves on the backs of uncompensated young men, whose status as 'student-athletes' deprives them of the right to due process guaranteed by the Constitution — is to catch an unmistakable whiff of the plantation."

It is an old debate but recent events have begun to ripen it, turning the elephant in the stadium into a topic for widespread conversation. For instance:

In a diversified television marketplace where cable channels and DVRs have lessened the profitability of traditional programming, live sports remains a lucrative audience-grabber. So networks like ESPN, Fox, NBC and CBS have spent lavishly in recent years for the right to televise games.

Eyes were opened in 2008 when the Southeastern Conference signed a set of deals worth a reported $2.25 billion with CBS and ESPN to televise its inventory. Those same eyes bulged last spring when the Pac-12 Conference agreed to receive a reported $3 billion from ESPN and Fox for its inventory. (And yes, it's "inventory" in "industry" parlance now. Forget "games" held by "colleges.")

Taking television money out of the equation, it has become even more expensive to watch college football in person. On Wednesday of last week, Ole Miss was selling tickets to its opener against the University of Central Arkansas for as "low" as $35. The good seats are $55. Sideline season tickets are $325, but required donations to the school's private fundraising organization could be even more than the cost of the ticket itself. And that says nothing of concessions and parking.

At FedExForum for a Grizzlies game, such exorbitant costs are chalked up to the obscene salaries of the marquee players. Rudy Gay has to get paid, after all. In college, the players get nothing. The coaches — like Hugh Freeze, making $1.5 million per year at Ole Miss less than a decade after coaching at Briarcrest Christian School — are the price tag.

Former UCLA basketball star Ed O'Bannon has led a lawsuit against the NCAA alleging that it shouldn't be profiting from the use of a former player's image. The case continues, but some have wondered if a ruling in favor of O'Bannon and the other former players could lead to a sea change in how the NCAA has to address compensation concerns from players.

NCAA leaders haven't exactly had their heads in the sand over the issue. Last year, a proposal to add a $2,000 annual stipend for players was pushed along the NCAA's legislative channels. In January, it was tabled, though the issue remains alive and could go into effect in 2013-14.

"It would be very inaccurate to describe this as a setback for the $2,000, but rather (it's) a clear attempt to get it right," NCAA president Mark Emmert said in January, according to The Associated Press.

A loud voice in the corner of such a measure belongs to South Carolina coach Steve Spurrier. In 2011, he proposed to fellow SEC coaches to pay players by the game.

"(It's) just the enormous amount of money that comes in from college football," Spurrier said in August 2011. "Our players need to share in it a little bit, not a lot. I'm not trying to pay 'em to play. If we paid them for their performance, we'd have guys making a million dollars a year.

"We got some guys a lot better than some of those NFL guys that are making two and three million a year as far as that goes. I'm just talking about expense money, allow those guys to live a little bit more like normal students on campus."

Cedric Henderson, the former Tiger basketball great, chuckled when asked last week if he could've ever used some extra cash here or there.

"That's like every day," he said. "I mean, it's always that thought. We weren't fortunate to be on the good side of society all the time. ... We had packed gyms all the time, averaging 18,000, 20,000. (I thought), hey, can we get a piece of that?"

But Henderson knows the flip side to the argument, that it would be an undue financial burden on some schools and would only force separation of the haves and have-nots even more.

Lang Wiseman, a former Tennessee basketball player, says he's "generally" against the idea of paying players, in large part because he's not certain where the money would originate. And while in "a perfect world," he said, there might be some financial consideration for the players, he hopes they also realize that the college game gives them an opportunity, provides them a stage to showcase their next-level talent, that they could not otherwise get.

"This notion that kids are being taken advantage of — no one's forcing you to take a scholarship," Wiseman said. "Don't take it if you don't think it's fair."

That tends to be the chief argument against paying players, of course, that they're getting a free ride to college. In an era of skyrocketing tuition, that's no small matter.

But in this era of skyrocketing, well, everything when it comes to college sports, the argument over paying players surely will not die soon, not when millions file into stadiums this fall, no matter the price, or watch the "inventory" on television.